ShelterTech Cassey SMS

Overview

This repository contains code for ShelterTech Cassey SMS, a chatbot that aims to help homeless people, through basic SMS. The project is currently under development.

System Architechture

The chatbot contains, for the most part, 3 components:

• Facebook Messenger Platform: provides the user interface. Cassey's page lives there, and the user interacts with the bot by sending and receiving messages to/from the page.
  Note that we are only using this for the purpose of prototyping. We will switch to a platform that can actually send and receive text messages from the user in the future.
• Dialogflow Platform: the dialog manager of the bot. Handles most of the NLU and NLG tasks, which includes understanding what the user wants, and responding to their input accordingly, in natural language.
• Node.js based webhook: the program contained in this repository. It basically acts as the middleman between the two components above.
  For example, when the user sends a message on Messenger, Messenger would send this message to this app, the app would then relay this message to Dialogflow. Dialogflow then tries to understand this message, and sends a response to the webhook, the webhook then passes this message to Messenger to be displayed to the user.
  The webhook is not doing anything interesting in the example above. Another scenario where it becomes more useful could be when the user asks for resources near them. Dialogflow can't complete this query alone, because it doesn't have any homeless resource data available. Therefore, we can set it up so that it instructs our webhook to query some database, or 3rd party API, to complete this task.

Setting up the local development environment

1. Install node.js. Make sure you can use the node command in your terminal.
2. Clone this repository and open it.

   git clone git@github.com:yzxchn/ShelterTechCasseySMS.git
   cd ShelterTechCasseySMS

3. Download the required node packages:

   npm install

   this command would install the packages specified in package.json.
4. Get the config file by pinging me through email/Slack, and put the file in the root directory of the project.
5. Test and make sure you can run the server successfully:

   NODE_ENV=local node app.js

   The NODE_ENV=local part tells the app that it is running in the local environment, which has different configurations compared to, say, the dev environment.
6. Download ngrok
7. Start ngrok by typing the following command:

   /path/to/ngrok http <NODE_APP_PORT>

   where /path/to/ngrok is where you put the downloaded file. If it is in your current working directory, then it should be ./ngrok. <NODE_APP_PORT> is the port number the app is running on after you typed the command in step 5.
8. Now you should have an https URL for the app running on your machine. Use this URL to connect it to the Facebook app.